Newsletter Leaf Journal CXCV 〜 Days with my newsletter
The 195th edition of The New Leaf Journal features links to our new articles and short posts, which cover everything from presidential election history to ongoing anime series and the true meaning of "the birds are free." We also have our customary 21 links from around the web and other news and notes.
Welcome to the 195th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. We had a busy week at The New Leaf Journal and its sister site, The Emu Café Social. However, this will not be a busy newsletter beyond reporting on the week that was and sharing our usual assortment of links from around the web, because I have some non-New Leaf Journal work to take care of. Thus, I hope you enjoy what will be a streamlined newsletter.
Leaves from the week that was
I only published five new articles last week. While I did not match the near record-breaking eight articles from the previous week, four of the five articles were substantial and the shorter one was the best of the five (in my humble opinion, at least).
My showcase article of the week is a new Justin and Justina dialogue, Free as a Bird. Free as in Bird.. Our resident fictional dialogue duo has a philosophical discussion about what freedom means in the context of the assertion that a feral pigeon is free. The dialogue was inspired by a photo I took years ago and no longer have. If you are not familiar with the Justin and Justina dialogues, you can consider this as good a place to start as any.
For the second straight week, I published an article on presidential election statistics and trivia. Last week we covered age gaps between the two members of every presidential ticket going back to 1804. That survey led me to undertake a new presidential election statistics project: Stats on the win/loss rates of the older and younger candidates in presidential elections going back to 1824. I also looked at trends and unusual scenarios, isolated for elections not involving incumbents, and studied elections where the age gap between candidates was at least eight years.
I published our first anime hair color article in more than two months -- this one covering hair color in the ongoing summer show Days with My Stepsister. However, most of the article is actually about the anime's superlative aesthetics and cinematography and how that elevates otherwise middling material. The focus on hair color only comprises the latter part of the article.
I published an article on using DuckDuckGo to perform domain-specific searches three years ago. I marked the three year anniversary of that article with a post focusing inward: I used DuckDuckGo and many other search engines and front-ends to conduct domain-specific searches of The New Leaf Journal and compared how they handled a common query.
Finally, I published a New Leaf Journal news update article which doubles as a plugin review for WordPress administrators on my move to using Manual Related Posts to curate the related posts section beneath all of our articles.
I have also gotten back into the swing of publishing new posts on our short-form posting site, The Emu Café Social (you can easily follow my posts on the fediverse at @naferrell@social.emucafe.org). I published what is effectively a future article preview regarding a change to one of my two New Leaf Journal-famous Google Nexus 7 (2013) tablets. That followed my advertising an amusing typo I made while searching for an article on The New Leaf Journal. Speaking of things related to Android, I shared my thoughts on free and open source Android feed readers. I overheard something on the street and expressed my I thought that already happened reaction to Google cutting off Russian YouTube account holders from Google AdSense. Having previously written about hall effect joysticks and the Nintendo 64 controller on The New Leaf Journal, I shared my thoughts about a new hall effect mod kit for the classic Nintendo 64 game pad. Finally, I published two anime articles: The first covered my favorite all-time sports anime and the second addressed my looking forward to the second season of MF Ghost (the first season of MF Ghost made a cameo appearance in my 2023 anime review back in January).
Leaves from the week that was
I did not have time to add comments to the new links I collected since mailing Newsletter 194. Thus, the new links will have to wait for future newsletters. We are going to work on clearing out my link backlog instead.
Getting a headache
Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
Derek Sivers. June 22, 2009.
"See: In most of Japan, streets don’t have names! Blocks have numbers! Streets are just the empty space in-between blocks." (This gave me a headache.)
The Strangest Hit Songwriter in History
Ted Gioia for The Honest Broker. June 12, 2024.
Now it would be the strangest 30 songwriters for one song.
SEGA history
Ex-Sega President Michael Katz On ColecoVision, Atari, And The Early Years Of The Genesis
Jack Yarwood for Time Extension. January 15, 2023.
An interview with the global head of marketing at Sega of America for the launch of the Sega Genesis.
Former Sega Head Of Marketing Al Nilsen On Genesis And The Birth Of 'Sonicmania'
Jack Yarwood for Time Extension. December 23, 2023.
An interview with the man who was global head of marketing at Sega of America from 1990-1996.
The latest in books
Bookworms, in etymology & entomology
Grammarphobia. January 15, 2024.
I see what they did there with the headline.
Early Bookcases, Cupboard & Carousels
saucyindexer for Lost Art Press. July 28, 2024.
Book storage and presentation through the ages.
Memory Holed
Trend D. Laviano for The American Mind. March 27, 2024.
I agree with all of the concerns about digital book altering and censorship but I will addend the post by submitting that this is an argument in favor of off-line, DRM-free ebooks.
Find the rhyme
The Rise Of 'Scam Games' And 'Keyword Bingo' Firms Flooding Switch eShop
Gavin Lane for Nintendo Life. August 12, 2023.
Turns out spam game makers are very litigious on YouTube.
The Story of Uncle Sam, the Embodiment of the Fourth of July
Suzanne Spellen for Brownstoner. July 4, 2024.
The inspiration for Uncle Sam probably did not much physically resemble Uncle Sam.
“Illegal Under Taliban Law”: CNN Seeks Summary Judgment Under a Curious Claim in Defamation Case
Jonathan Turley. August 6, 2024.
What CNN MEANT to say was that the conduct was TaliBANNED (so don't take all of our money).
Iron can't cut diamonds
Komodo Dragons Have Iron-Coated Teeth, Study Finds
Will Sullivan for Smithsonian Magazine. July 31, 2024.
Doesn't really change good practice guidelines for [not] interacting with them.
Are Diamonds Really Rare? Diamond Myths and Misconceptions
Seth I. Rosen for International Gem Society.
Someone is too good for diamonds.
The wide world of sports
My Kingdom for a Sport: Saudi Arabia Goes All in on Athletics
Griffin Kelly for The Daily Upside. March 17, 2024.
Too much Western analysis of Saudi Arabia presupposes that Saudi Arabia's spending binges are motivated by the interests of Western journalists (this article is good, however).
The Making Of: FIFA Road To World Cup 98, The "Greatest FIFA Of All Time"
Jack Yarwood for Time Extension. February 25, 2024.
I never played a FIFA game so I have no opinion on which is best, but this is a good game history post.
Classic persuasion
See the Portrait That Made Henry VIII Fall in Love With Anne of Cleves, Newly Restored to Its Former Glory
Meilan Solly for Smithsonian Magazine. March 19, 2024.
Neat they restored the portrait that led to a happy, long-lasting marriage.
The Art of Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s “Michelangelo of Tattooing” (ca. 1905)
Hunter Dukes for The Public Domain Review. March 12, 2024.
The quote in the headline was actually contemporaneous to Mr. Macdonald.
Thrills Gum
Atlas Obscura.
I never heard of this gum before but I respect the advertising slogan.
But back to me
This 16-Foot-Tall Pigeon Sculpture Is Coming to New York City’s High Line
Julia Binswanger for Smithsonian Magazine. August 6, 2024.
Imagine if we get to rescue this pigeon.
The Return of the Ojibwe Pony, the Midwest’s Native Horse
Roxanne Hoorn for Atlas Obscura. July 25, 2024.
Not often do I get the opportunity to call the number of my pony-sizing cannon article.
Miscellaneous
What colour are shadows? – Andy Walker Art
Andy Walker. June 7, 2024.
Apparently more colorful than they first appear.
This Tiny Fern Has the World's Largest Known Genome
Will Sullivan for Smithsonian Magazine. June 4, 2024.
Surely that gives it some sort of secret power.
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics to track page hits. In each issue of the newsletter, I list our five most-visited articles, according to Koko Analytics, for the one-week period beginning with Saturday and ending with Friday. Below, you will find the most-visited articles of Newsletter Week 33 (August 10 through 16).
(1) Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2. (NAF. November 5, 2023)
15 appearances and 9 top placements in 2024 (all appearances in 2024).
(2) An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search. (NAF. October 18, 2022.)
15 appearances and 2 top placements in 2024; 27 appearances and 7 top places all time.
(3) Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) (NAF. July 28, 2021,)
12 appearances in 2024; 13 appearances all time.
(4) Understanding Hair Color in the Kimi ni Todoke Anime Series (NAF. August 19, 2021.)
2 appearances and 1 top placement in 2024; 5 appearances and 1 top placement all time.
(5) Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGo. (NAF. August 8, 2021.)
First appearance in 2024; 4 appearances all time.
Analysis
Last week presented few surprises. My specious article on having good foresight to review the first season of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten next year continues to dramatically out-perform my actual review of the anime, returning to the top spot and taking its ninth first-place ranking in 11 weeks. Fifth place was weak last week, giving my article on site-specific searches in DuckDuckGo the chance to make its first top five since Newsletter Week 12 of 2022. One fun note from the week is that spots 3-5 are occupied by three articles that were published on July 28, 2021 and August 19 and 8 of the same year respectively, but those three articles have combined to make only 22 appearances all time. Go figure.
I will note that we are having a very strong Saturday thus far (by recent standards, on par with typical numbers for much of January and February of this year), and we started seeing unusually good numbers from DuckDuckGo and Bing in the last few days. If these trends hold up, it may mark trouble for the continued ranking dominance of my Angel Next Door article, which has been remarkably consistent for 11 weeks but at the same time has not put up the sort of page view numbers that would be sufficient for the top spot in our better months.
Taking leaf
Well this newsletter turned out to be longer than I thought, but it was quick to write because I made a speed-run through the around the web selection.
I hope you enjoyed the newsletter. If you are not already a regular reader, you can sign up for our weekly email, add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or simply check in on the archive page every now and then when you want something to read. See our options here.
At the moment, I have several articles that are just about ready to publish, some that are close to reaching that point, and a few ideas that I want to write and get online this month. Of course, I also suddenly have a good amount of non-New Leaf Journal work to do, so we will see how it all shakes out. I look forward to reporting back to newsletter readers next week.
Until August 26,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.